“YOU cannot be serious,” tennis ace John McEnroe famously shouted when the umpire ruled one of his shots as “out”. Reader John Mulligan suspects that the patent officer felt the same way about Timothy Wace Roberts’s patent application for a “Business method protecting jokes”.
The abstract of his US patent office application 200602593306 opens: “The specification describes a method of protecting jokes by filing patent applications therefor, and gives examples of novel jokes to be thus protected. Specific jokes to be protected by the process of the invention include stories about animals playing ball games, in…
